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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cook07192011.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook07192011.html<br><br>
</a></font><font size=2 color="#990000">July 19, 2011<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Israel Rules Out
Non-Violence<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">The
Method in Netanyahu's
Madness</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By
JONATHAN COOK<br><br>
<i>Nazareth.<br><br>
</i></font><font size=3>It was an Arab legislator who made the most
telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the
boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in
the occupied territories. Ahmed Tibi asked: "What is a peace
activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there
anything you agree to?"<br><br>
The boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws
being introduced by the far-right. The legislation's goal is to
intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to
bow down before the majority-rule mob.<br><br>
Look out in the coming days and weeks for a bill to block the work of
Israeli human rights organisations trying to protect Palestinians in the
occupied territories from abuses by the Israeli army and settlers; and a
draft law investing a parliamentary committee, headed by the far-right,
with the power to veto appointments to the supreme court. The court is
the only, and already enfeebled, bulwark against the right's absolute
ascendancy.<br><br>
The boycott law, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu's government, marks a
watershed in this legislative assault in two respects.<br><br>
First, it knocks out the keystone of any democratic system: the right to
free speech. The new law makes it illegal for Israelis and Palestinians
to advocate a non-violent political programme -- boycott -- to counter
the ever-growing power of the half a million Jewish settlers living on
stolen Palestinian land.<br><br>
As the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy observed, the floodgates are now
open: "Tomorrow it will be forbidden to call for an end to the
occupation [or for] brotherhood between Jews and Arabs."<br><br>
Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather
than criminal, offence. The state will not be initiating prosecutions.
Instead, the job of enforcing the boycott law is being outsourced to the
settlers and their lawyers. Anyone backing a boycott can be sued for
compensation by the settlers themselves, who -- again uniquely -- need
not prove they suffered actual harm.<br><br>
Under this law, opponents of the occupation will not even be dignified
with jail sentences and the chance to become prisoners of conscience.
Rather, they will be quietly bankrupted in private actions, their assets
seized either to cover legal costs or as punitive damages.<br><br>
Human rights lawyers point out that there is no law like this anywhere in
the democratic world. Even Eyal Yinon, the naturally conservative legal
adviser to the parliament, assessed the law's aim as stopping a
"discussion that has been at the heart of political debate in Israel
for more than 40 years". But more than half of Israelis back it,
with only 31 per cent opposed.<br><br>
The delusional, self-pitying worldview that spawned the boycott law was
neatly illustrated this month in a short video "ad" that is
supported, and possibly financed, by Israel's hasbara, or propaganda,
ministry. Fittingly, it is set in a psychiatrist's office.<br><br>
A young, traumatised woman deciphers the images concealed in the famous
Rorschach test. As she is shown the ink-splodges, her panic and anger
grow. Gradually, we come to realise, she represents vulnerable modern
Israel, abandoned by friends and still in profound shock at the attack on
her navy's commandos by the "terrorist" passengers aboard last
year's aid flotilla to Gaza.<br><br>
Immune to reality -- that the ships were trying to break Israel's
punitive siege of Gaza, that the commandos illegally boarded the ships in
international waters, and that they shot dead nine activists
execution-style -- Miss Israel tearfully recounts that the world is
"forever trying to torment and harm [us] for no reason".
Finally she storms out, saying: "What do you want - for [Israel] to
disappear off the map?"<br><br>
The video -- released under the banner "Stop the provocation against
Israel" -- was part of a campaign to discredit the recent follow-up
flotilla from Greece. The aid mission was abandoned after Greek
authorities, under Israeli pressure, refused to let the convoy sail for
Gaza.<br><br>
Israel's siege mentality asserted itself again days later as
international activists staged another show of solidarity -- this one
nicknamed the "flytilla". Hundreds tried to fly to Israel on
the same day, declaring their intention to travel to the West Bank. The
goal was to highlight that Israel both controls and severely restricts
access to the occupied territories and to Palestinians.<br><br>
Proving precisely the protesters' point, Israel threatened airlines with
retaliation if they carried the activists and it massed hundreds of
soldiers at Ben Gurion airport to greet arrivals. Some 150 peaceful
protesters who reached Israel were arrested moments after
landing.<br><br>
Echoing the deranged sentiments of the woman in the video, Israel's prime
minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced the various flotillas as
"denying Israel's right to exist" and a threat to its
security.<br><br>
In reality, however, the surge in flotilla activity reflects not an
attack on Israel but a growing appreciation by international groups that
Israel is successfully sealing off from the world the small areas of the
occupied territories left to Palestinians. The flotillas are a rebellion
against the Palestinians' rapid ghettoisation.<br><br>
Although Netanyahu's comments sound delusional, there may be a method to
the madness of measures like the boycott law and the hysterical
overreaction to the flotillas.<br><br>
These initiatives, as Tibi points out, leave no room for non-violent
opposition to the occupation. Arundhati Roy, the award-winning Indian
writer, has noted that non-violence is essentially "a piece of
theatre. [It] needs an audience. What can you do when you have no
audience?"<br><br>
Netanyahu and the Israeli right understand this point. They are carefully
dismantling every platform on which dissident Israelis, Palestinians and
international activists hope to stage their protests. They are making it
impossible to organise joint peaceful and non-violent resistance, whether
in the form of boycotts or solidarity visits. The only way being left
open is violence.<br><br>
Is this what the Israeli right wants, believing both that it will confirm
to Israelis' their paranoid fantasies as well as offering a justification
to the world for entrenching the occupation?<br><br>
Netanyahu appears to believe that, by generating the very terror he
claims to be trying to defeat, he can safeguard the legitimacy of the
Jewish state -- and destroy any hope of a Palestinian state being
created.<br><br>
<b>Jonathan Cook</b> won this year's Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for
Journalism. </font><font face="Verdana" size=2>His latest books are
“<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745327540/counterpunchmaga">
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake
the Middle East”</a> (Pluto Press) and
“<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1848130317/counterpunchmaga">
Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair</a>” (Zed
Books). His website is
<a href="http://www.jkcook.net">www.jkcook.net</a>.<br><br>
<br><br>
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